“When I'm tired and thinking cold / I hide in my music, forget the day /And dream of a girl I used to know/ I closed my eyes and she slipped away / She slipped away / It's more than a feeling / When I hear that old song they used to play” 

– Boston, “More Than A Feeling”, 1976

 

“Invisible airwaves / Crackle with life /Bright antennae bristle /With the energy /Emotional feedback /On a timeless wavelength / Bearing a gift beyond price /Almost free /All this machinery / Making modern music / Can still be open-hearted / Not so coldly charted /It's really just a question /Of your honesty, yeah your honesty”- Rush, “The Spirit of Radio”, 1980

 

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain” - Bob Marley

 

“God has given us music so that above all it can lead us upwards. Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate, even to make us tremble… The musical art often speaks in sounds more penetrating than the words of poetry, and takes hold of the most hidden crevices of the heart… Song elevates our being and leads us to the good and the true. If, however, music serves only as a diversion or as a kind of vain ostentation it is sinful and harmful” – Friedrich Nietzche, autobiographical fragment, date unknown

 

“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without” ― Confucius, The Book of Rites

 

"Styles of music intended for dancing have a way of evolving into music for listeners only" --Charles Keil and Steve Feld, Music Grooves, 1994

More participatory musics are more rhythmically complex (and harmonically simple); more contemplative musics are rhythmically simple (and more harmonically complex).’

– Simon Frith Performing Rites, 1996

 

“Silence is an integral part of all good music. Compared with Beethoven’s or Mozart’s, the ceaseless torrent of Wagner’s music is very poor in silence. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it seems so much less significant than theirs. It “says” less because it is always speaking” - Aldous Huxley, “The Rest Is Silence” from Music at Night and Other Essays, 1931

 

"Music is nothing but organised noise. You can take anything -- street sounds, us talking, whatever you want -- and make it music by organising it" --Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy, 1990.

 

“Music has a thirst for destruction, every kind of destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation. Is that not its potential 'fascism'?" --Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980

 

"Why are rhythmical sounds and motions so especially contagious? A rhythmical call to the crowd easily foments mass ecstasy: 'Duce! Duce! Duce!'. The call repeats itself into the infinite and liberates the mind of all reasonable inhibitions.... as in drug addiction, a thousand years of civilization fall away in a moment.... Rock'n'roll is a sign of depersonalisation of the individual, of ecstatic veneration of mental decline and passivity” - Dr Joost A.M. Meerlo, New York Times, 1957

 

“Music “says” things about the world, but in specifically musical terms. Any attempt to reproduce these musical statements “in our own words” is necessarily doomed to failure. We cannot isolate the truth contained in a piece of music; for it is a beauty-truth and inseparable from its partner. The best we can do is to indicate in the most general terms the nature of the musical beauty-truth under consideration and to refer curious truth-seekers to the original. Thus, the introduction to the Benedictus in the Missa Solemnis is a statement about the blessedness that is at the heart of things. But this is about as far as “our words” will take us. If we were to start describing in our “own words” exactly what Beethoven felt about this blessedness, how he conceived it, what he thought its nature to be, we should very soon find ourselves writing lyrical nonsense… Only music, and only Beethoven’s music, and only this particular music of Beethoven, can tell us with any precision what Beethoven’s conception of the blessedness at the heart of things actually was. If we want to know, we must listen...” -  Aldous Huxley, in “Music at Night,” from Music at Night and Other Essays, 1931

 

“Music...is the vapour of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves” - Victor Hugo, in William Shakespeare, 1864

 

“Architecture is music in space....  a frozen music” 

- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 1845

 

"This music is here in opposition to other music. It doesn't all co-exist together nicely. The fact that I have chosen to do this implies that I don't value what you're doing over there. My activity calls into questions the value of your activity. This is what informs our musical thinking and decision making" – UK improv musician John Butcher, in The Wire magazine, 2008